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From 19 October to 27 January, the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal hosts a special exhibition dedicated to the work of Pedro Costa. Pedro Costa: Companhia is based on the premise that each film is a letter with an uncertain recipient: a postcard, according to Costa, which passes around from hand to hand and gathers in itself all layers of time. This notion implies the existence of both a continuity and a community: a gesture that is repeated and updated each and every time anyone creates a film or a cinematic experience.

The exhibition features paintings, sculptures, drawings, books, poems and documents that shed light on the sources and influences of the distinctive poetic language manifest in Pedro Costa’s cinematographic vision. Companhia brings together works by Costa produced in collaboration with sculptor Rui Chafes, photographer Paulo Nozolino and film directors Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub and Chantal Akerman. The exhibition also features works by artists who Pedro Costa repeatedly summons to his films, including poet Robert Desnos and photographer Jacob Riis, as well as paintings, drawings and films that have accompanied Costa’s life and work as a filmmaker. These include works by Pablo Picasso, Robert Bresson, António Reis, Walker Evans, João Queiroz, John Ford, Jeff Wall, Jacques Tourneur, Maria Capelo, Andy Rector, Jean-Luc Godard and Max Beckmann, among others.

At first it seems like a contradiction, a historical irony: Jean-Louis Comolli – the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma during its period of Althusserian Marxism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the author of some of the most important texts to critique the ideological nature of the “impression of reality” in the cinema (‘Cinéma/idéologie/critique,’ a manifesto-editorial co-signed with Jean Narboni, and the series of articles ‘Technique et idéologie’) – has gone onto become a prolific, highly regarded documentary filmmaker, with a filmography that stretches from the 1970s to the present day and includes more than fifty titles, made for both cinema and television. Is this transition from film theory to film practice a stunning volte-face, a theoretical apostasy from the revolutionary ethos of the post-1968 era, so common among other soixante-huitards? Nothing of the sort.